Page 34 - HW April 2020

spouting & guttering
Urban intensi cation is placing growing demands on stormwater systems; Marley’s Curve leaf diverter can help prevent sediment being created.
I ask the thorny question about the e ectiveness of products like gutter screens and gutter inserts.
“As long as they are well installed and maintained they’re all e ective,” says Ed Aitken, carefully, adding a general caveat around cost e ectiveness in applications where they may not be needed.
From a professional’s point of view and in respect of his workers’ health & safety, Ed adds that gutter screens can be problematic to remove and replace during maintenance,
but this depends on how they’re attached to the building. GutterCare may be one of the biggest installers of Marley
rainwater products but Ed Aitken is pretty agnostic about which material is to be used.
“We don’t care what the material is, it’s about the quality of the installation and the ongoing maintenance, which is really the key to all of this stu .
“But yeah, but we quite like the plastic option simply because it’s modular and you can chop a piece out and replace it.”
No surprise then that GutterCare prides itself on preserving the existing gutter if at all possible, to the point where Ed and his team’s expertise might be able to derive another ve years’ life out of a gutter system “as opposed to ripping it all o and putting some brand spanking new stu on there.”
But, if you do start from scratch, warns Ed Aitken, maintain it! Otherwise, in ve years’ time, your new spouting & guttering system will be in the same state as the one you just replaced...
TRUST AND RISK AVERSION
Just as the country went into lockdown, I managed to get some time with Marley’s Product Manager, Nigel Montgomery, to nd out what’s new in his universe.
Like many other suppliers, having lled the supply chain to the brim in the days and hours leading up to the advice to stay at home, Nigel wasn’t looking forward to the obvious hiatus that would follow.
Still, he says: “I think the way things have escalated lately, nobody wants to be the next Italy. And certainly for Marley and in the wider Aliaxis group the priority is the health and safety of sta .”
Rewinding a little, Marley had “a good start to the year” across
all of its building, plumbing, electrical and civil markets.
And for rainwater products in particular, Nigel talks of “good
gains” in new builds (“builders are returning to PVC” he says), also highlighting signi cant growth in demand for the coloured Stratus Design Series and the black colourway in particular over the ve years since launch.
Quizzed about this “return to PVC”, Nigel Montgomery explains it’s all about averting risk: “Marley has been around a while, it’s well supported, durable, quality product and the trade has been just way too busy to deal with any call-backs for faulty products.”
Speaking of which, a few years ago now we talked about knock-o product – has that gone away?
“Well, it’s still there,” he admits. “A lot of installers have been stung by inferior quality products. We’ve had a couple of cases also where we’ve been contacted about burst pipes and so forth saying you’re tting’s failed and, upon investigation, it’s Marley pipe, but in our opinion they’d put an inferior tting on it.
“So our message is that if you stick with our tried & trusted, proven products then there’s a lot less risk of product or job failure down the track.”
INTENSIFICATION AND WATER MANAGEMENT
e ongoing shift towards denser housing types and more intensi ed urban landscapes has also touched on many aspects of the hardware channel, Marley’s business included.
Indeed, leaf diverters like Marley’s Curve product for example have changed from being just a known concept from a rural perspective into a solution for urban applications, in Auckland particularly.
“With urban intensi cation and the growth of underground stormwater detention tanks, councils in particular are looking for those to be kept clear of sediment,” explains Nigel Montgomery.
“ e Curve leaf diverter can keep leaves out of the system, which is important because, if they get in, they break down to form sediment that adversely impacts the system.”
Another shift in Marley’s business thanks to densi cation and particularly around its coloured products is that these days it’s selling as much downpipe as spouting.
Nigel explains: “On a given house one might expect the ratio to be four to one in terms of lineal metres, four being spouting. But our lineal metre sales of downpipe now equal spouting.”
Driving this stepchange is a shift in building types in the larger markets, towards smaller footprints but taller forms which obviously require smaller runs of spouting and longer runs of downpipe.
e key is to stay ahead of the curve: “It was a good start to the year and everything was going to plan,” re ects Nigel Montgomery.
“But now we just need to make sure that we carry on our internal product development. So, when this period is over, we’re ready to hit the ground running again.”
We too look forward to this time.
32 NZHJ | APRIL 2020
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